The Parasites

  THE PARASITES

  Daphne du Maurier

  Foreword by Julie Myerson

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  For Whom the Caps fit

  MENABILLY.

  Spring, 1949.

  Parasites

  Animal Parasites are invertebrate animals which have taken up their abode in or upon the living bodies of other animals.

  From a broad biological outlook parasitism is a negative reaction to the struggle for existence, and always implies a mode of life that is nearer the line of least resistance…

  Occasional parasites are to be distinguished from permanent parasites. Among the former are the bed-bug and the leech, which usually abandon their host when they have obtained their object.

  In the embryo stage they are migratory, moving from host to host, or to a free life before becoming mature…

  Among the latter are the so-called fish-lice, which, with piercing mouth organs and elaborate clinging apparatus, remain in the same host always, and are among the most degenerate parasites known.

  Parasites affect their hosts by feeding upon their living tissues or cells, and the intensity of the effect upon the hosts ranges from the slightest local injury to complete destruction.

  The Encyclopedia Britannica.

  Foreword

  I first encountered The Parasites in the Nottingham Library, summer of ’76. A fat, yellow Gollancz hardback wrapped in thick, cloudy polythene and date-stamped inside, it would have been one of six novels I borrowed that week from the tall Gothic building on Shakespeare Street. It was the summer I finished my O Levels—a long, parched scorching heatwave of a summer. Every day you thought it couldn’t get any hotter but it did. I was a tense, nail-chewing teenager who shunned boys and wrote “novels” in exercise books. To me that city library was a sanctuary, the safest place in all the world—and icy cool to boot.

  I haunted it like a ghost. I knew its opening hours, where its toilet was, and which of its haughty librarians was most likely to let me lurk in peace. I learned to dodge its furthest aisles, where the tramps punctured the air with their snores and musty urine smells. Instead, breath held, I loitered in Fiction, fingering every single, grubby spine on those shelves as I looked—for what? A way into a secret world? Dispatches from the front line of personal experience—a place I had yet to get to myself?

  Probably both. But most of all I remember searching for novels that might in any way touch on my pet obsessions: dance, writing, painting, theater, ghosts, Cornwall, sex—especially sex. I can see now that The Parasites—a strange, ambiguous love story set in a world of dark, Lutyens houses, Morny soap and brittle, fading theatrical glamour—would, in its sly way, have satisfied quite a few of these criteria.

  I do know that I thought it was a very grown-up novel. Infinitely dark and sexy and weary—in the very most attractive sense of the word. Weary and worldly. Here was a world of cocktails and dinners, of matinées and debutante’s feathers, of virginities lost in Paris apartments. In fact the precise flavor of weary-worldliness I sensed lurking in those pages made me feel reckless, daring, chaotic—everything a romantic, provincial sixteen-year-old fantasized that grown-up life might one day be.

  What I didn’t see then—probably because I was too wrapped up in my adolescent self to get it—was how mischievously comic a novel it is, how successfully and enjoyably it sends up the upper classes, actors, theatrical types, the rich by birth, the terminally self-absorbed. I think at that age I would have completely missed the savage and satirical anger that lies at its dark heart—a ferocious, sometimes surprising fury which keeps it bubbling, never lets it become glossy, camp or self-indulgent in the way that novels about theatricals and show business so often are.

  But that’s not all. Another aspect struck me even more forcefully when I picked the novel up again, now, in 2005. I found myself moved and shocked by its central relationship and I experienced a sense of déjà vu I couldn’t shake off. What did it remind me of? Where had I come across this kind of bond before?

  This is the story of a strange and powerful, quasi-incestuous love. Here are a girl and a boy who grow up as siblings but are not blood related—whose bond is intense, passionate, unstoppable. They understand each other intuitively, like twins, but the love itself is immature, hopeless and selfish, irresponsible even, leaving no room for others. It’s the story of two people who spend their whole lives both in thrall to and in denial of, this central passionate relationship—because however hard they try to pull apart, whatever other relationship (or marriage) each tries to forge, they always spring back together again, helpless. Who else does this remind you of? Doesn’t another English novel spring immediately to mind?

  Of course there are many differences between Maria and Niall and Cathy and Heathcliff, but still I find the similarities curiously impossible to ignore. These are harsh and possessive loves, devastating at times. There is a darkness here that seems to blot out the possibility of any kind of future. Both Maria and Niall are perplexed to find that now and then they want to hit the other “very very hard.” Except to think it’s a relationship of violence is to misunderstand it—the hitting never happens. It’s about frustration, sexual and logistical: how else to get sufficiently inside each other’s skins? When Maria is on the stage, Niall can’t watch but has to leave, so closely and painfully does he identify with her terror. Maria is the only person who always knows what Niall is thinking—sometimes even before he does. And yet, just like Cathy and Heathcliff, Maria and Niall sometimes don’t seem separate enough to be able to form a normal, useful adult relationship. Indeed, if family servant Truda is Nellie Dean’s counterpart, then you can almost hear Maria declaring to her, “Truda, I am Niall!”

  I also see more to link Brontë and du Maurier. Both authors use landscape to invoke passion—and libido. Both have an inherently and fascinatingly queasy relationship with their characters. Du Maurier apparently admitted that all three Delaneys were probably facets of her own personality—and she is certainly rare among women novelists in that she seems to inhabit her male characters at least as fully as her female ones and with absolute authenticity and ferocity. The same could certainly be said of Brontë. Not only that, but it’s undeniable to anyone who knows their work that a prime strength of both Brontë and du Maurier is their ability and willingness to imagine and mine the darkest reaches of the human mind, of passion and sexuality (the male and the female side) and of life and death. These are brave writers, unafraid to look over the edge into the abyss.

  But there the similarities end, because there’s certainly no comedy in Wuthering Heights. And yet some of the most unsettling scenes in du Maurier’s novel are also its funniest. My favorite is the one where Maria, who has married the Hon. Charles Wyndham (for reasons very similar, by the way, to those that drive Cathy into a marriage with Edgar Linton) and given birth to a daughter, Caroline, finds herself left alone with that baby one afternoon. Spoiled, immature and inexperienced, she is quite unable to cope. Without even thinking twice about it, she calls Niall who, also without a thought, drops everything and comes running to help.

  But it’s no good. Here are two children in c
harge of a child. When Caroline won’t stop crying they stop the car and, in desperation, ask a passing woman what they should do. Unsurprisingly, she gives them short shrift and threatens to call a policeman. They drive on. Maria remarks that she can see now why mothers leave their babies in shops. “They can’t stand the strain.” Only half joking, Niall suggests they leave Caroline in a shop. Both agree that no one would miss her. Eventually Maria has an idea and asks Niall to stop at Woolworths so she can buy a comforter. “You know, those awful rubber things that common babies have stuck in their mouths.”

  They get the comforter and it works. Caroline stops crying.

  “How easy it would be,” said Niall, “if every time one felt on edge one could just go to Woolworths and buy a comforter. There must be something psychological about it. I think I shall get one for myself. It’s probably what I’ve wanted all my life.”

  It’s a laugh-out-loud scene—and rather novel and startling suddenly to be reading du Maurier on childcare and the oral comforting of babies—but it’s also a very damning one. Nowhere else in the novel is the parasitical nature of du Maurier’s protagonists better expressed. These are selfish creatures who are reluctant to fulfill anyone’s needs but their own. But take away the comedy and you begin to wonder, what does du Maurier herself feel about all of this? What does she want us to think, and whose side is she on anyway?

  A tricky question because, more than anything, The Parasites is stylistically on the edge, an exercise in narrative sleight of hand. The clue lies in that very first sentence: “It was Charles who called us the parasites.” Called who? Well, the three Delaneys: Maria, Niall and Celia, obviously. But which Delaney is talking? You read on, expecting to have the question answered, to have it all made clear—and very quickly realize it’s impossible to tell.

  Because this is a tale told by three people and therefore, in a sense, never really told by anyone. Just when you think you’re getting close, the invisible narrator swerves away and disappears. You can almost hear du Maurier laughing. And, though we spend time in the heads of all three Delaneys in turn, there is never a single moment when that bold, all-encompassing “We” turns into “I.” So who, ultimately, does the author sympathize with most? Brittle, fragile Maria? Dogged, lonely Niall? Unfulfilled, put-upon Celia? Whose skin is she in? And does it matter if we never find out? It’s a tribute to the complexity and breadth of this strange, unnerving novel that I’m still trying to decide.

  Julie Myerson

  London

  January 2005

  1

  It was Charles who called us the parasites. The way he said it was surprising, and sudden; he was one of those quiet reserved sort of men, not given to talking much or stating his opinion, unless upon the most ordinary facts of day by day, so that his outburst—coming, as it did, towards the end of the long, wet Sunday afternoon, when we had none of us done anything but read the papers and yawn and stretch before the fire—had the force of an explosion. We were all sitting in the long, low room at Farthings, darker than usual because of the rain. The french windows gave very little light, chopped as they were in small square panes that added to the beauty of the house from without, but inside had all the appearance of prison bars, oddly depressing.

  The grandfather clock in the corner ticked slowly and unevenly; now and again it gave a little cough, hesitating momentarily, like an old man with asthma, then ploughed on again with quiet insistence. The fire in the basket grate had sunk rather low; the mixture of coke and coal had caked in a solid lump, giving no warmth; and the logs that had been flung carelessly on top earlier in the afternoon smoldered in dull fashion, needing the bellows to coax them into life. The papers were strewn about the floor, and the empty cardboard covers of gramophone records were among them, along with a cushion that had fallen from the sofa. These things may have added to Charles’s irritation. He was an orderly man, with a methodical mind, and looking back now with the realization that his mind was at that time laboring under heavy strain, that he had in fact reached a point where it was imperative that he should make up his mind about the future and come to a decision, it is understandable that these little things—the untidiness of the room, the casual, careless, sprawling atmosphere which pervaded the whole house when Maria came for the weekend, and which he had endured now for so many months and years—acted as the first spark to fan the boiling resentment into flame.

  Maria lay, as she always lay, stretched out upon the sofa. Her eyes were closed, her usual defense against attack from any quarter, so that people who did not know her thought she slept, that she was tired after a long week in London, that she needed rest.

  Her right hand, with Niall’s ring upon the third finger, drooped in weary fashion over the side of the sofa, the finger-tips touching the floor. Charles must have seen it from where he sat, in his deep armchair, opposite the sofa; and although he had seen and known the ring for as long as he had known Maria, accepting it in the first place as he would have done any personal belonging of hers dating possibly from childhood days, like a comb, a bracelet, worn from routine without sentiment; yet the sight of it now, the pale aquamarine stone, clinging tightly to the third finger, so valueless and paltry compared to the sapphire engagement ring that he himself had given her, and the wedding ring too, both of which she was always leaving about on the washbasin and forgetting, may have served as further fuel to his smoldering anger.

  He would know, too, that Maria was not sleeping. The play she had been reading was thrown aside—the pages were already crumpled and one of them torn, the puppy had been allowed to play with it—and there was the smear of a sticky sweet dropped by one of the children on the cover. During the next week or so the play would be returned to the owner, with the usual note from Maria scribbled in her careless handwriting or typed on the indifferent machine she had bought at a junk-sale years ago: “Much as I liked your play, which I found extremely interesting and which I am sure will be a great success, I don’t somehow feel that I should be quite right or really what you want in the part of Rita…” and the owner, though disappointed, would be flattered and say to his friends, “She liked it enormously, yes indeed,” and think of her ever afterwards with regard, almost with affection.

  But now the play lay on the floor, scrapped and forgotten with the Sunday papers, and whether any thought of it passed through Maria’s mind as she lay on the sofa, with her eyes closed, Charles would never know. He had no answer to that, or to any of her thoughts, and the smile that hovered a moment at the corner of her mouth and went as swiftly—it happened now, in her pretence of sleep—had no connection with him, or with his feelings, or with their life together. It was remote, the smile of someone he had never known. But Niall knew. Niall was sitting hunched on the window seat with his knees drawn up, staring at nothing; and even from there he had caught the smile, and guessed the reason.

  “The black dinner dress,” he said, apparently without reason, “tightly cut, revealing every curve. Doesn’t it just show what sort of man he must be? Did you get beyond page five? I didn’t.”

  “Page four,” said Maria, her eyes still closed, her voice coming from a lost world. “The dress slips, a little further on, betraying a white shoulder. I skipped to see. I think he must be a little man with pince-nez, going rather thin on top, and too many gold fillings.”

  “Kind to children,” said Niall.

  “Dresses up as Father Christmas,” went on Maria, “but they’re never fooled because he’s not careful enough about hitching up his trousers, and they will show under the red gown.”

  “He went to France last summer for his holiday.”

  “That’s where he got the idea; he watched a woman across the dining room at the hotel; nothing happened, of course. But he couldn’t take his eyes off her bosom.”

  “Now it’s out of his system he feels better.”

  “The dog doesn’t, though. He was sick on the lawn just now, under the cedar tree. He’s eaten up page nine.”

 
The movement from the armchair, as Charles changed his position and straightened out the sports page of the Sunday Times, should have warned them of irritation, but they took no notice.

  Only Celia, intuitive as always to approaching storm, raised her head from her workbasket, and flashed the warning glance which was disregarded. Had the three of us been by ourselves she would have joined in also, from force of habit, from amusement; because this was something we had always done, from childhood days, from the beginning. But she was a guest, a visitor, and it was Charles’s house. She felt instinctively that Charles disliked the tone of banter between Niall and Maria, which he did not share; and the silly mockery of the author whose tangled play lay on the floor, discarded by the puppy, seemed to him cheap and not particularly funny.

  In a moment, Celia thought, watching Niall straighten up and stretch his arms, Niall will wander to the piano, and yawn, and frown, and stare at the keyboard with that tense look of concentration that means in reality he is thinking of nothing at all, or merely what there would be for supper, or whether there was another packet of cigarettes up in his bedroom; and he will begin to play, softly at first, whistling under his breath, as he had always done since he was twelve years old, on those old prim upright French pianos; and Maria without opening her eyes would stretch also, and put her arms under her head, and hum softly, under her breath, in tune to Niall. At first he would lead, and she would follow, and then Maria would break away into a different song, a different melody, and it would be Niall who caught the pattern and come ghosting after her in repetition.

  And Celia thought that she must in some way, however clumsily, prevent Niall going to the piano. Not because Charles would dislike the music; but because it would be yet another of those unnecessary pointers to the fact, from which he must suffer, year in, year out, that Niall alone, before husband, sister, children, knew what went on in the closed shell that was Maria’s mind.